The present invention relates generally to an information processing apparatus and method, a program, and a recording medium, and more particularly, to an information processing apparatus and method, a program, and a recording medium which are capable of recommending particular pieces of content to users on the basis of metadata even though they are assigned with no classification.
For methods of recommending television programs (or content), the initial interest registering method, the viewing log using method, and the coordination filtering method are known for example.
In any of these schemes, an electronic program guide (EPG) and program information (or program metadata) on the Web are used for the original data. Classifications of these three schemes depend on how to acquire data of user's preference to be matched with these pieces of information.
The initial interest registering method renders the user to register his favorite categories (drama, variety, etc.), his favorite genre names (drama, music, etc.), and his favorite television personalities for example at the starting of use. Subsequently, matching is made with program metadata with the registered information used as keywords, thereby program names to be recommended are acquired.
In the viewing log using method, every time the user views a program, the program metadata associated with the viewed program is accumulated, and when the viewing log (or program metadata) has been accumulated to a predetermined amount, this viewing log is analyzed to acquire program names to be recommended. Alternatively, instead of the viewing log, an operation log such as the preset recording or the start of recording done by the user may be used on devices in which recording is made on a hard disk drive for example. In this case, the information about programs which highly reflect user's interest can be acquired rather than vague information about programs.
In the coordination filtering method, a matching is made between one user's viewing (or operation) log and another user's viewing log to acquire the viewing log of another user similar to the user concerned in viewing log. Then, program names which have not been viewed by the user concerned are acquired from among the programs viewed by another user similar (in favorite) to the user concerned in viewing log, thereby recommending the acquired program names not viewed by the user concerned.
Use of any of the above-mentioned program recommendation schemes allows the recommendation of the programs in which the user is interested.
However, these program recommendation schemes present problems that programs having similar names tend to be recommended because the interest of user is extracted from program metadata (namely, a biased interest in television programs is acquired), and generally popular names are used owning to the structure of program metadata.
To overcome these problems, the applicant hereof proposed a technology in which the electronic mail daily used by the user is analyzed to extract user's preference information, thereby executing content recommendation (refer to patent document 1 for example).
Patent document 1: Japanese Patent Laid-open No. 2001-312515
However, the technology disclosed in patent document 1 presents a problem that it takes much labor for the analysis of the preference information and therefore it is difficult to easily and quickly execute content recommendation.